Experiences in Introducing Blended Learning in an Introductory Programming Course

As students shall be able to apply their gained theoretical knowledge practically, usually exercises are offered. But assessment of the exercises is a very time-consuming task and due to the increasing number of students often even infeasible. Though programming exercises can be efficiently tested against expected output, the assessment systems often only deliver feedback regarding the correctness and sometimes additionally which test cases fail. But so far, these systems are not able to identify the reason for the error. Therefore, there should also be human tutors available with which students can discuss their solution and which can help them in identifying their misconceptions. In this paper, we describe the experiences we made when we introduced blended learning to our introductory programming course, which problems occurred, and how we plan to deal with the problems.